The present invention relates to arrangements for viewing clinical images. It is particularly concerned with arrangements which allow simple selection of images for viewing together, selected from among a large collection of image data representing different imaging modalities captured at different times.
In the present description, the following terms may carry the following meanings, or equivalents thereof:
Time Point—A collection of acquisitions pertaining to one clinically relevant period in time.
Acquisition—A collection of reconstructions pertaining to one clinical examination, this may be multiple series in one study or a subset of the series in a study, but will have all been taken on the same scanner and be tied to the same combination of raw data.
Scan—a data acquisition event in which a patient is placed in scanner and a protocol is run which results in numerous series (reconstructions) being created.
Reconstruction—A set of images that have been derived from a scan.
Recon—A reconstruction.
Layout—A specific organization of images on a display.
Segment—A view which may display a single image, or it may show a 3D re-projection created from multiple original images, or a segment may contain an image like fusion comprised from two different series.
Hanging protocol—The organization of images in a clinical radiographic presentation.
Series—One or more 2D or 3D images. In the case of oncology procedures these will often be slices of the same volume which the system will then interpret as a 3D volume of the patient and project and display in myriad ways back to the physician.
Study—A collection of series.
Registration—A process of aligning two volumes or images such that they are well correlated.
DICOM—Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine: explained further at dicome.nema.org.
Extent—the proportion of a patient's body represented in an image
Clinicians have to compare data that has been acquired in different coordinate systems, using different modalities and at different times in order to provide a complete clinical interpretation. The following example mixtures of data are commonly read in a single sitting for evaluating image data for a single patient:
1. Data reconstructed in different ways from a single set of scan data, for example different CT slice thickness reconstructions;
2. data acquired in different modalities, but at a same time—known as “co-acquired data”—such as PET and CT data acquired in a combined CT/PET scanner;
3. Sequentially acquired body regions in a same modality, for example CT data representing a patient's thorax followed by CT data representing the same patient's abdomen;
4. Fast sequential acquisitions of data, such as multi-phase CE CT;
5. Temporally-related but separate volumes from a single acquisition, such as Dynamic PET;
6. Collections of data for a long term comparisons, for example, sets of corresponding data taken pre- and post-treatment.
In order to optimize a clinician's workflow, image combinations are typically prepared by a technician for viewing by the clinician. The data is conventionally read using a number of different hanging protocols or layouts. For example, the data may be correlated using side-by-side viewing or fusion. The images must be aligned to one another in order to provide a useful combination of information to the clinician.
The richness and complexity of this data means that the preparation for a clinical read is often a time-consuming manual process, sometimes taking longer than the clinical interpretation of the data once visualized. With the advent of “advanced imaging” the number of presentation parameters that need to be specified for each image displayed on the screen has also dramatically increased. Overall this forms a barrier to the key task of the clinician which is to visually interpret these images.